of Ralph Courteville, a gentleman of the royal chapel, who died in 1675. In 1691 he was appointed organist of St. James' church, Piccadilly, and was the author of the standard psalm tune known as St. James'. While he was of good repute as an accomplished musician, he was also a literary reviewer and critic of some celebrity. He was supposed to be in the pay of the state, for the purpose of writing up the government of Sir Robert Walpole, and was consequently stigmatized, by the opposite party, by the appellation of Court-evil. The dates of his birth and decease are unrecorded.—E. F. R.
COUSIN, Victor, a celebrated French philosopher and litterateur, was born at Paris, 28th November, 1792. After giving high early promise, Cousin was appointed in 1815 by M. Royer Collard to deliver lectures on the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne. His prelections, which were characterized by great vigour and brilliancy, attracted an unusual amount of attention. They were, however, suddenly interrupted by the reactionary measures of government, which in 1820 caused M. Royer Collard to withdraw from the council of the university. M. Guizot, who was then also a lecturer at the Sorbonne, shared the same fate. The leisure which Cousin had thus unwillingly forced upon him he employed in perfecting his philosophical studies. He travelled also for some time in Germany, where the too free expression of his liberal sentiments brought him acquainted with the prisons of Berlin. To this period, it may be added, belongs his edition of Proclus—Procli philosophi Platonici Opera, 6 vols. The reign of jesuit ascendancy having ended. Cousin was restored to his chair of philosophy in 1828, and commenced those series of lectures which immediately attained a popularity altogether unprecedented since the age of scholasticism. Two thousand auditors listened in admiration to his expositions of abstruse and difficult doctrines. "The daily journals found it necessary," says Sir William Hamilton "to gratify, by their earlier analyses, the impatient curiosity of the public; and the lectures themselves, taken in short-hand and corrected by the professor, propagated weekly the influence of his instruction to the remotest provinces of the kingdom." After the revolution of 1830 Cousin resigned his chair and became inspector-general of education. In 1832 he was made a peer of France, and in the same year published his celebrated report on the state of education in Prussia and Holland. He was meanwhile a regular contributor to the Journal des Savants, and, having been chosen member of the French Academy, as well as of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, took an active part in their various labours. Cousin again held office as minister of public instruction during the short administration of M. Thiers in 1840. Since the revolution of 1848 he has kept wholly aloof from political affairs.
M. Cousin, whose studies had embraced the entire range of moral and metaphysical philosophy, fluctuated for some time amongst its various systems. Plato, of whose works he gave a translation, Reid and the Scotch philosophy, Kant, Proclus, and Hegel, each engaged his attention in turn. He at length professed to adopt a system of impartial and universal eclecticism—a method which was to turn philosophy into a new path, and heal her manifold divisions. More of a Cicero than a Plato, he takes high rank as an expounder of philosophy rather than as a philosopher. His lectures, entitled "Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie," are extremely brilliant, and present a lively, if not always a just view, of the various systems of philosophy that have appeared in the world. Philosophy, according to Cousin, is nothing else than reflection elevated to the rank and authority of a method. Indeed philosophy is nothing but a method. His system, such as we understand it, may be indicated in a few words. There are three ideas necessarily inherent in human reason: the idea of the finite, revealed to the consciousness by the interaction of the ego and the non ego; the idea of the infinite or of necessary substance, the common principle of the ego and the non ego, which also is an infinite cause; and the idea of the relation that exists between these two. Ideas, it should be remarked before proceeding farther, are not mere words, neither are they beings, but they are the mode of existence of eternal reason, and only in some manner lent to other reason. These three terms of the fact of consciousness belong to every individual, are common to the race; and as the reason of the human race manifests itself in history, the three ideas must also necessarily reveal themselves in the sequence of human affairs, so that psychology becomes the true interpreter of history. Accordingly M. Cousin carries his theory into history, and boldly asserts that there must be three great historical epochs corresponding to the three ideas included in human reason, and that there can possibly be no more. It is curious to compare the different results at which a Cousin, the champion of ideas, and a Carlyle who would banish all such phantoms from the mind, severally arrive in regard to the same subject. Cousin, around whom come trooping at the slightest wave of his philosophic wand, the "ideas" of all the sciences of the eighteenth century, pronounces that century "one of the greatest that have appeared in the world." Carlyle, whose keen eye, wandering over its hundred years, can discern nothing greatly noble or heroic, brands it with the stigma of unexampled poverty and meanness. In such opposite directions do hero-worship and idea-worship wander from the simple truth! "It (i.e. the eighteenth century) brought," says Cousin, "the middle age to a close; it fulfilled that tragic mission—it fulfilled only that; a century, a single century, is seldom charged with two missions at once." (!) And so the centuries, like so many well-drilled regiments, march in order through the philosophical imagination, each with its mission-inscribed banner flaunting in the air. And this is the philosophy of history!—M. Cousin latterly applied himself to a minute and conscientious examination of the history of France during the first half of the seventeenth century. Disgusted with the meanness and distraction of his own age, he sought relief in the greatness of the past. The period which he chose is that, to use his own words, "inspired by the genius that prompted Henry IV., Richelieu, and Mazarin; dictated the edict of Nantes, and the treaty of Munster and the Pyrenees; and whence sprung Corneille's Cid, Descartes' Discours de la Méthode, Pascal's Provincials, Moliere's Misanthrope, and all the finest sermons of Bossnet—the genius to be everywhere recalled and glorified; because it is the genius of France herself at the hour of the completest development of her national grandeur." The fruit of his studies in this direction is already, at least in part, possessed by the world in his admirable historical biographies of Madame de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, Jacqueline Pascal, and Madame de Hautefort. Cousin laboured incessantly to wean his countrymen from the utterly worthless literature which has for so many years corrupted the popular mind. And it is but right to add, that the purpose of his writings was admirably seconded by the perfect honour and consistency of his life. His principal works, besides those already mentioned, are "Fragments Philosophiques," 2 vols.; "De la Metaphysique d'Aristote;" "Philosophie Scolastique;" "Leçons sur la Philosophie de Kant;" "Fragments Litteraires;" together with editions of the works of Maine de Biran, Abailard, P. André, &c. M. Cousin died in January, 1867—R. M., A.
COUSTOU, Guillaume, an eminent French sculptor, brother of Nicolas, born in 1678; died in 1746. He was a successful student at the academy, and was sent to Rome to perfect his resources. Returning to Paris, he was intrusted with large works, occasionally in conjunction with Nicolas.—W. T.
COUSTOU, Guillaume, son of the preceding, was born at Paris in 1716. Like his father and uncle, he obtained the great prize of the academy, devoted five years to study at Rome, and subsequently returned to Paris to be received with acclamation into the academy. He was the treasurer of that institution at his death in 1771.—W. T.
COUSTOU, Nicolas, an eminent French sculptor, born at Lyons in 1658. At the age of twenty-three, obtaining the highest academy prize in his art, he was sent to Italy, provided with means by the government. On his return some most important works were intrusted by the government to his execution, and he was at once admitted into the academy. He died in 1733, having been for forty years a member of the academy. For his services to art, Louis XIV. gave him two pensions, amounting in all to six thousand francs.—W. T.
COUTHON, George, born at Orsay in Auvergne in 1756, was an advocate at Clermont when the French revolution broke out. He embraced its principles with enthusiasm, and was sent to the representative assembly by the department of Puy-de-Dôme, and soon became conspicuous as a leader of the jacobins. He voted for the death of the king, and subsequently, as too moderate in their republicanism, for the arrest of the Girondist deputies. The "Mountain" rewarded his zeal by appointing him a member of the committee of public safety. He was one of the two deputies sent to conduct the siege of Lyons. The
